Resources from Edwards Middle School

Below are documents provided by Edwards Middle School.

Edwards Middle School Daily Schedule - See how Edwards schedules their extended school day. Regular school hours are from 7:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. with expanded learning time happening Monday through Thursday from 1:40 p.m. to 4:20 p.m.

Edwards Middle School Assessment Calendar - The assessment calendar for the 2012-2013 school year includes district predictive tests as well as state and national tests. Once students complete predictives, they are placed in their respective academic blocks, then Edwards staff can begin to prepare students for state and national tests. These include Massachusetts Comprehensive Asessment (MCAS) and National Assessment Education Progress (NAEP).

Curriculum Team Long Term Plan - This document helps to show how Edwards teachers and staff lay out their curriculum schedule for the entire school year. Each week, teacher leaders from content area teams, or "families," as they call it, turn in a Curriculum Team Alignment Plan to the Director of Instruction. The Director of Instruction makes sure that Edwards is keeping up with all standards for both Boston Public Schools (BPS) and the Common Core.

Teacher Collaboration - This document is used to plan the Edwards professional development schedule. Edwards has 80 minutes of planning time each week, twice as much as the standard for BPS schools. Edwards prefers having 80 minutes of professional development time for creating and fine tuning their master schedule and working with the curriculum long term plan.

Curriculum Team Alignment Plan - The curriculum team alignment plans are turned in by teacher leaders to the Director of Instruction every week. These sheets display objectives and expectations for BPS curriculum, Common Core in math and science, the mastery learning objective for the week, and the language objective. The document has flexibility with pacing plans for weeks when classrooms require high levels of differentiated instruction, language readiness, and learning profiles of students.

Reading and Interpreting Poetry - Worksheet on which students must answer four questions based on a poetry example from class -- two questions are discussed in class and two are answered in notebooks that students hand in

Below are links to information as well as articles and other media coverage featuring Edwards Middle School from media outlest including The New York Times, The Huffington Post, and National Public Radio.

Academic Leagues at Edwards Middle School - Excerpt provided by NCTL from the Time Well Spent Report, explaining how Edwards has closed the achievement gap within Massachusetts in math, English language arts, and science with their Academic Leagues